Category Archive for: Reviews

Part traditional and part bedroom farce, with an appropriately absurd plot that you feel compelled to see through to the end despite the high frequency of groan-worthy jokes, Unnecessary Farce is a well received and a timely poke at all things sly and silly. The play starts as a police stakeout, trying to nap a crooked mayor

With one two-act-long scene, eight loudly slamming doors, and countless head-over-heels tumbles, Unnecessary Farce by Paul Slade Smith makes its hilarious D.C. premiere at the Keegan Theatre. Directed by Ray Ficca, this true-to-style farce tails two stumbling undercover cops in their attempts to expose an embezzling mayor and in the process crashes headlong into a mafia ring, a

The performers make the most of it. The characters who are supposed to engage our sympathy — [Noah] Schaefer as Eric and [Jenna] Lawrence as Billie — eventually do so, notwithstanding that their characters appear to have the IQs of toasters. (Lawrence does an outstanding bit where she rapidly translates the hit man’s incomprehensible Scottish

It’s not exactly clear what fluids sustained the original Ebenezer Scrooge on his late-night tour, but Dublin native Matthew J. Keenan is pretty darned sure what would fuel the old cuss in Ireland today. The beers and the Jamesons flow like water in his seasonal offering, An Irish Carol, a hardened, touching, hilarious tour of a

An Irish Carol does a fine job capturing the spirit and message of Charles Dickens’ classic holiday tale in an evening spent in an Irish pub. No small feat. The play, courtesy of author Matthew J. Keenan, is not a direct retelling of A Christmas Carol (and that’s a good thing, as the stage has no shortage of

If you need tidings of comfort and joy, look no further than the Keegan Theatre’s seventh annual production of An Irish Carol. This is the second year in a row that this reviewer has had the pleasure of seeing this irreverent and heart-warming gem, and I can say that it only improves upon further acquaintance.

Now in its seventh year, the Keegan Theatre’s annual production of Matthew J. Keenan’s An Irish Carol has become a favorite Washington DC holiday tradition. It’s easy to see why. A quintessentially Irish take on Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, Keenan’s play offers a holiday-perfect tale of redemption and the power of love. All joie de vivre seems to have been

THE AUDACIOUS OPENING act of Caryl Churchill’s modern classic Top Girls assembles a millennium’s worth of female power, pain, and wisdom at one lively dinner party. Setting the mood for a story focused on modern career woman Marlene (Karina Hilleard), Churchill enlists five larger-than-life female figures — real and fictional, legendary and literary — to voice the

In the original 1982 New York Times review of the Public’s production of “Top Girls,” critic Frank Rich explained the way that the playwright Caryl Churchill sees the theatre as “an open frontier where lives can be burst apart and explored.” It recalls an image of the playwright as a conjurer, creating characters like stars

A look back at the past that contains a look back at the distant past, Top Girls comes across as almost more of a recently-written period play than the 1982 piece that it is. That is a credit to playwright Caryl Churchill’s balanced eye, which captures the tone of the era in which she wrote it without